Magisterial Malcontents and Errant Envoys: Asian Connections to Portugal's Overseas Council, 1642–1833

Originally published in 1973, Stuart Schwartz's "Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil" is celebrated today as a ground-breaking work on Portugal's colonial bureaucracy. By examining the careers and backgrounds of High Court magistrates in colonial Brazil, Schwartz showed how personal relationships complemented—and in many ways undermined—the administration of royal justice in the Portuguese Atlantic. Building upon this seminal work, this paper shifts the geographic focus to Portuguese Asia, an area that has largely been neglected in current literature on the Luso-Brazilian world. More specifically, it treats the history of Portugal's Overseas Council—a powerful metropolitan tribunal that governed Portugal's seaborne empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—tracing the tribunal's personal links to Goa, Macau, and other parts of Portuguese Asia. Based on archival research in Portugal, Brazil, and Macau, the paper shows how Portugal's colonial bureaucracy developed into a system in which itinerant bureaucrats frequently acted as personal intermediaries in an extensive network of patronage that connected Asia with the rest of the early modern Luso-Brazilian world.